With more than a thousand varieties, a succulent symphony of tastes—and perhaps a philosophy of the universe, too

Just three of India’s huge roster, from Goa. Clockwise from left, the Musarrat, the Fernandin and the Xavier.
Photo:
Rustom Irani

In last year’s film “Victoria and Abdul,” we see Queen Victoria’s Indian manservant describing to her the delights of his homeland’s mangoes, “the Queen of Fruits.” Intrigued, the world’s most powerful person immediately requisitions some. The fruit arrives, an offering from a subject subcontinent, and is presented in a velvet-lined box by two liveried staff. The Queen looks uncertainly to Abdul, who turns, disappointed, to his employer.

“This mango is off.”

“Henry,” the Queen exclaims to the attendant, “this mango is off!”

As it was bound to be. The mango is one of the few things in this world even more high-maintenance than monarchs. As then, so now: The great redeemer of South Asia’s long, sweltering summer is a reluctant, tetchy traveler. Mangoes don’t like long journeys. They are perversely self-harming, sometimes puddling under their own weight. They reach perfection for a day or two (when with a final blast of refrigeration they are sublime) and then swiftly turn overripe and soggy.

Whichever god brought forth the mango, she did so as a project that would frustrate imperial desires in the 19th century and defeat even the global supply system of capitalism in the 21st. That’s why almost all the mangoes in American markets are the fine-looking but bland, fibrous pretenders from Florida, Brazil or Mexico, not the storied ones of India. Here the frostless winters and tumultuous summers provide the perfect weather cycle for complex and memorable fruit: warm to the touch even days after being picked and redolent of one or all of honey, lemon, peach, rose, cinnamon, pepper or sugar cane.

There is an upside to this delightful perishability: Not being a happy traveler itself, the mango is, therefore, a traveler’s fruit. It’s one of those joys of life that can’t be acquired by throwing money at it. In olden times, traveling mendicants and traders often ate a bigger range of mangoes than kings and landowners did.

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A stable, ordered man-made mango universe was carved out of the chaos and caprice of creation.
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The mangoscape of India—where the mango originated, somewhere in the northeastern foothills near modern Myanmar—is immense. Some 4,000 years of spontaneous proliferation and studied cultivation, plus the dozens of new varieties developed in recent centuries by grafting and calculated hybridization, have allowed a vast diversity of mangoes (called “cultivars” in the scientific literature or, more evocatively, “landraces”) to proliferate. The most comprehensive list, prepared in 1998 by the mango scientist S.N. Pandey, lists 1,663 kinds of mangoes. More than a thousand are found solely in India.

Of these, the vast majority are not easily found in markets, being either too small or unpredictable in output, or having too short a season, or being single trees in a grove of one of the major landraces. Even the most dedicated of mango-eaters in India has sampled only a small fraction of the mangoscape, and most lay eaters only know the major commercial cultivars like the Banganapalli, the Alphonso, the Dussehri and the Langda. I asked R.R. Virodia, professor of agriculture at Junagadh Agricultural University in Gujarat and an important name in the mangosphere, how many kinds of mangoes he had eaten. He said, “Probably no more than a hundred.”

And so, realizing that even at this late stage in history we still await a Marco Polo of mangoes, I set out last month with a plate, a sharp knife and a notebook, to eat as many mangoes as possible in a fortnight across India. Big or small, yellow or green, broad-shouldered or long-beaked, cutters or suckers, I sought them out in that hundred-degree heat.

I began in Goa, the tiny state on India’s west coast that was for 400 years a Portuguese colony. Goa is the sacred land where the story of the modern mango begins. It was Portuguese horticulturists, many of them cassocked priests, who, puzzled by the fact that mangoes grown from seed often failed to reproduce the characteristics of the parent, worked out that mangoes reproduce through what is called open pollination, which offers unreliable results.

To keep the lineage of mangoes true to type, they invented the system of vegetative propagation, or grafting. This allowed “the preservation of outstanding varieties which originated as chance seedlings,” to quote S.R. Gangolly from his classic survey of Indian mangoes, full of delightful color plates, from 1957, now out of print.

Entering the Mangoscape

India’s hundreds of varieties don’t take well to long journeys, so travelers must come to them

Kalimullah Khan, at 78 years old the greatest name in the world of Indian mangoes, stands under a tree in Malihabad, Uttar Pradesh that he calls “both a tree and an orchard.” Over the last three decades, he has grown more than 300 different types of mangoes on its branches.

Sara Hylton for The Wall Street Journal

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Kalimullah Khan, at 78 years old the greatest name in the world of Indian mangoes, stands under a tree in Malihabad, Uttar Pradesh that he calls “both a tree and an orchard.” Over the last three decades, he has grown more than 300 different types of mangoes on its branches.

Sara Hylton for The Wall Street Journal

In this way, a stable, ordered new man-made mango universe was carved out of the chaos and caprice of creation. “Even today,” the great mango scientist A.R. Desai told me, “some of the best mango trees in Goa are to be found in churchyards.”

In a hotel room in Panjim, the Goan capital, I set down a stash of Mancurados, Hilarios, Fernandins, Musarrats and Xaviers that I had bought at dawn at the municipal fruit market (their baroque names pointing to their origins in Catholic botany). I ate them with a steadily escalating elation—and disbelief that I had lived less than 400 miles north in Mumbai for half of my life and never encountered one of these superstars.

The rare chitla mango of north India, unusual for its green and white coloring, presented at an exhibition in the small mango-growing town of Rataul, north of Delhi. Growers delight in presenting unusual fruit at mango exhibitions.
Photo:
Chandrahas Choudhury

On I went, up the western coast of India into Gujarat, then 1,000 miles east to Bhubaneswar, then down south to Karnataka to a giant festival of peninsular mangoes, and finally 1,200 miles north to the great mango-growing district of Malihabad. Everywhere, I ate mangoes I had never eaten before: Amrapallis and Akhurasas, Gulab Khases and Neelams, Imam Pasands and Sugar Babies. After a point I didn’t even bother to wipe the juice off my beard or the stains off my clothes. I became a mango bum.

Mango-eating requires particular attitudes. It is best done alone, without the impediments of social etiquette and table manners to constrain the licking of fingers, or the disapproving faces of sophisticates to sour the sweet. Eaten in solitude, mangoes generate words, as the mind rummages for language to describe precisely what the senses are experiencing. They also resuscitate memories, as the almost symphonic taste fires up deep places in the soul that quotidian experience could never hope to approach.

And there is a social aspect of mangoes too. They exemplify a dwindling subcontinental culture of camaraderie and large-heartedness, best articulated by those who have spent their entire lives growing, grafting and gifting them. Some of my richest experiences on the mango trail were of people rather than fruit.

In Malihabad, I went to see Kalimullah Khan, the greatest name in the world of Indian mangoes. A small, chirrupy man in his late 70s, he has been growing mangoes in his family orchard for sixty years. On this plot stood his pride and joy: a giant mango tree on which he had painstakingly grafted more than 300 cultivars since 1987. “It is both a tree and an orchard,” he said in an artful humblebrag, as he looked up into its massive canopy.

A mango picker at an orchard in Junagadh, India, where Kesar mangoes originated and are grown exclusively, unlike in regions that pride themselves on great variety.
Photo:
Salil Prakash Kawli

To walk around this botanical marvel, watching the mangoes change in shape and size on the branches every few yards, was to experience creation in all its mystery and plenitude. And the vivid old man had, over the years, come to propound a sort of mango-centered mysticism. “The union of two to make one is the founding principle of the universe—and of mango-grafting,” he declared.

“This tree of mine I have made for the unity of the world, to show how things that appear different are all aspects of the same creation,” he said. “In truth, we are all mangoes on the same tree. What do you think?”

“He who has eaten a mango has but eaten a mango,” I replied, wise from so much ambrosial eating. “But he who has eaten many mangoes, has truly seen the world.”

—Mr. Choudhury is a writer based in New Delhi. His novels include “Arzee the Dwarf” (New York Review Books) and “Clouds” (forthcoming in April 2019).